Three days ago, in an essay about the scapegoating of green jobs advisor Van Jones, who was hounded out of office by wingnut Fox commentator Glenn Beck, I wrote this: We must act now to put a brake on scapegoating before it once again becomes the force that controls public life. The issue will not …
We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence of the good people. Dr. Martin Luther King In the Hebrew calendar, this is the time of t’shuvah, literally turning, but often translated as repentance. In preparation for the new …
For several months now, I’ve been ending every talk I give with the same message to artists and activists: This moment of seismic shifts and insecurity in economies, governments and communities challenges us to make our work equally valid and powerful as art, as spiritual practice and as political speech or action. The first time …
This is the first section of a talk I gave on 19 June 2009 at the National Summit of Ensemble Theaters, meeting at the University of San Francisco. Click here to download the full text. I’ve just moved back to California, part of a big life-change for me. Whenever I come here, I touch down …
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote briefly about the May 12th White House Briefing on Art, Community, Social Justice, National Recovery I had helped to organize. Now, a detailed report on the briefing has been released. You can download it from the Cultural Recovery page of my Web site. The report is the next …
The most-forwarded article award for this week goes to “The Creativity Stimulus” by my friend Jeff Chang, which appears in the May 4, 2009 edition of The Nation. It’s a concise and compelling argument for the vital role that artists and artists-activists can play in democratic renewal and national recovery: Every moment of major social …
Two more video clips have been produced to advocate putting artists to work as part of national recovery. One features movie star Peter Coyote, and the other features…well, as you can see—me. You can access both videos, plus one starring actor Bill Irwin, at my YouTube channel. I’ll be writing more soon about how others …
By now, I know my tribe: like Lewis Mumford, “I’m a pessimist about probabilities; I’m an optimist about possibilities.” (Or like Gramsci: “Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.”) If you’re a member too, perhaps you also watched Battlestar Galactica, a sci-fi series that just ended (but will certainly be available in one form …
It’s exciting and scary to be present at a birth. I’m not thinking of the literal kind except as an unimpeachable source of metaphor for the birth of an idea: as with a living being, we look for wholeness and soundness, the fulfillment of hopes in a generous measure of new possibility. For some time, …
We humans are good at condemning other people’s sins of omission. There’s a whole publishing industry around how much the average German knew about Nazi atrocities, for instance, calibrating ordinary people’s exact degree of culpability for what was done in their names. But it’s much harder to admit the same faults in our own and …